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The station rises fast, but not fast enough.

It is still incomplete — its weapons systems half-functional; its ability to stomp away unreason and impose Tom’s will on the cosmos unfinished — when Gotterdammerung arrives.

It is very sudden.

Cheryl is there, and she is monitoring the scissors-lights; billions of them, tens of billions, which is of course, no real concern. They will come around the sun and they will attack the Earth, and they will be harmlessly repelled.

Something disturbs her, though. Something causes her to rub at her nose and stare at the scissors-lights and think.

Something makes her go out to the observation deck with a telescope and stare out at the coming storm with her own two eyes; and that is when she sees the end of days.

The Fan Hoeng have come to make an end to the world. Twelve great stealth-ships — they are of no matter; death rays and lasers have they all, but still, they are nothing compared to Vidar’s Boot. Twelve great scissor-shaped ships, and she would laugh at them, save for what else that stealth conceals.

They have given their shelter to the swarm.

They have hidden them, blocked out the glittering of space. They move among the scissors-horde like cowboys among the herds.

They have concealed the coming, not of ten thousand scissors, nor ten billion, but sextillions of them, at least, rounded up and packed tighter than the old swarm was, and aimed sharply and directly at the Earth.

Cheryl stares for a long moment. Then she drops the telescope.

(You shouldn’t do this.)

She turns. She runs. And she knows as she runs that they have seen her as she them.

The lasers of the Fan Hoeng dart out. They flicker around the eyelets of the boot. Holy energy, death energy, and light; she barely dodges a fierce and far-aimed burst as she throws herself into the elevator from the observation deck and hits the emergency button with her palm.

The scissors-shield spurts up, and then collapses. Cheryl rockets down the boot’s great tongue.

She is screaming into the intercom, “Get St. Peter.”

The scissors’ day has come.

<< Chapter 20: Gotterdammerung

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